Busting the budget is everyone’s biggest fear when it comes to renovation. And with good reason. Even if you follow the essential advice we’ve been doling out for years—build in a 20 percent cushion to cover the nasty surprises, get contractor references and check them, banish the words “while you’re at it” from your vocabulary—it’s hard not to end up shelling out more than you want to, even if you want to pen a check for a million bucks. But why scale back a project or forgo that Viking range? No, what you need to do is get your dream at a price you can afford. And not by cheaping out, either. With some strategic thinking about design, materials, and timing, you can cut costs without cutting corners. On the following pages, we’ll show you the ways, from the big (knock down the house and start over) to something as small as choosing a wall sconce over a recessed light. But another universal truth about renovations is that every little thing adds up. So save a little here, save a little there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. 1. Increase efficiency, not size. If you can reorganize and equip your kitchen for maximum utility, you may not need to blow out the walls to gain square footage. Start by replacing space–hogging shelves with cabinet–height pullout drawers 8 inches wide, containing racks for canned goods and other items. “You’re getting three or more horizontal planes where you might otherwise get only one,” says Louis Smith Jr., an architect with Meier Group, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You could easily shell out a few thousand to outfit cabinets with upgrades like dividers, pull–out pot trays, and lazy Susans, but you’ll save many times that amount by skipping the addition you thought you needed. *Cost to expand kitchen by 200 square feet: $48,000 to $95,000 Cost of super–efficient, custom–designed cabinets: $35,000 SAVED: Up to $60,000 2. Bring in natural light without adding windows. Before cutting a big hole in the side of your house and rearranging the framing, consider less invasive—and less expensive—ways of capturing light. To brighten up a windowless bath or hallway, for instance, you can install a “light tube,” which slips between roof rafters and funnels sunshine down into the living space. Cost to add a double–pane insulated...

In June, this year, Republican Senator for Iowa, Chuck Grassley made an appeal to the Obama Administration to stop issuing immigrant and non-immigrant visas to citizens of 22 other countries. According to Grassley, 2,166 illegal immigrants were released in the US in 2015, and as many as 6,100 such individuals were set free in 2014 and 2013. The senator pointed out that Cuba, China, Somalia, India and Ghana are the five most...

The island nation of Cape Verde has pledged to power the entire country with nothing but renewable energy by the year 2020, and vowed to help other African states work towards the same goal in future. With almost no mineral resources of its own and little arable farmland, the outcrop in the middle of the Atlantic ocean relies on expensive imports for almost all the needs of its 550,000 population. But there are two things it does have...

A former restaurant owner at Hope Artiste Village said that she “wished she had sued” Urban Smart Growth (USG), the management company that was awarded $3.6 million in tax credits from the RI Commerce Corporation this week. Rosinha Benros, who had opened and owned the restaurant “Rosinha” at Hope Artiste Village, said she had a number of issues with USG — including having had gas being turned off due to...

My father is from Cape Verde and has many funaná records, and when I started to play music I realized that this music had stayed in my veins. In 1997 I was asked if I wanted to play bass on a new album, which became Bitori Nha Bibinha, with a talented and well-known accordion player from Cape Verde named Victor Tavares, who’s the bandleader of the group Bitori. After the album, we all went on and did different things—until last year,...

The government of Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) should promote fiscal consolidation, reduce public debt and make the economy grow, said on Wednesday in Praia the head of the mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that visited the archipelago. Ulrich Jacoby noted as negative factors for the economic development of Cabo Verde the occurrence of five years of weak economic growth, the archipelago’s dependence on the euro and the...

sep 14, 2016 adrian kasperski envisions development for fogo island in cape verde adrian kasperski’s first impulse for choosing a future work topic was seeing one of the reports by fernando guerra–a famous portuguese photographer of architecture. the photos presented an almost unnoticeable building hidden in a nearly lunar landscape. after analysing the topic, it turned out that this building served as the cultural andadministration...